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lose Maria. She almost left me right after the trial, feeling herself guilty of Jones’s murder. I talked her out of that, telling her that he had it coming to him anyway; and then she got morbid and turned on the gas one day. I got there in time, and the police emergency squad brought her around. After that she buckled down like the ace she was, and tried helping instead of hindering. God, when I think of her down on her four bones scrubbing floors, and rubbing her white hands raw on my shirts, I know what they mean when they say “For richer, for poorer”…
    I stood out on the sidewalk in front of the radio playhouse and shivered because I had sold my overcoat six weeks before. There was nowhere else to turn to, and I hadn’t the gall to go back to Maria so early in the day. Uptown, downtown, crosstown—all the same to me.
    A man walked up, looked me over, handed me a slip of paper. It said, “Could you tell me how to get to South Ferry from here?”
    I said, “Sure. Take the Seventh Avenue subway—”
    He shook his head, pointed to an ear. Deaf. I took the pencil heoffered, wrote down the directions. He tipped his hat, went his way. I remember wondering how a guy like that got such a nice warm coat. Some agency, I guessed. I got all my faculties and no overcoat. He’s a deaf mute and has an overcoat. I’ll take the overcoat.
    Then the great idea hit me. I smacked my hands together, whooped like a drunken Indian, and headed at a dead run for the West Side, where Maria was trying to make a home for me out of an eleven-a-month cold water flat. I reached it, flung myself up three flights of stairs, fell gasping and moaning for breath inside the room. Maria didn’t know what to make of it, and figured even less when I got wind enough to explain. If she was possessed, I wanted to know, could she keep from tipping anybody off about it
if she wrote the information down?
    “I don’t know, Eddie. I never tried it.”
    “Well, try it, damn it. Try it!”
    “H-how?”
    I glanced at the ninety-eight cent alarm clock on the stove. “Come on, babe. Get your coat on. We’re going to get some money.”
    She was used to me by this time or she never would have done it. I didn’t tell her until we reached the pawnshop that the money was coming from the one thing of value she’d hung onto—the star sapphire I’d given her as an engagement ring the day before we got married. Under the three golden spheres I relieved her of it, shoved an old envelope and a stub of pencil into her hands, and dragged her in.
    I knew the broker well by that time. The only Irishman I’d ever seen in a hock shop. “Terry, me lad,” I shouted. “I’m about to do you a favor. Hock me this ring for eighty bucks and you can’t lose a thing.” I gave it to him. He grunted sourly. Maria started forward, about to speak. I shoved her toward a trunk, pointed at the paper and pencil. She grinned and began to write.
    “I’ll give ye ten,” said Terence.
    “And I’ll take me pathronage ilsewhere,” I mocked him.
    “Twinty, an’ ye’re a young thief.”
    “Sivinty-foive, ye grave-robber.”
    “Twinty-two an’ a half, and be dommed to ye. It’s white gold, not platinum.”
    “Platinum’s twenty bucks an ounce on the open market you pernicious old Gael, and gold’s thirty-five. Don’t blind me with your jeweler’s tricks.”
    And still not an interruption from Maria.
    Terence looked at the ring carefully through his glass. “Thirty dollars.”
    “Will you make that thirty-two fifty?”
    “I will that, and there I’m done.”
    “You’re a good business man, Terence, and I’ll treat you right. You just went up ten dollars and I can afford to come down ten. That’s meeting you halfway at sixty-five dollars.” Maria’s pencil scribbled busily.
    “Fifty dollars to get yez out o’ my store,” said the broker with a great effort.
    “Fifty-seven fifty.”
    We settled at fifty-five; I signed the book and we left. As soon as we were